why would you use soulseek for chat

i don’t go into the chat rooms, but i get about one dm a week from some rando or another who’s downloaded something from me thanking me for having whatever shit from 30 years ago they haven’t heard in forever, it’s honestly been a pretty positive experience overall for me.

like this lad last night

My philosophy is that slsk is for the downloads, not the conversation.

I don’t even know why there’s a chat room function in it. I never use it tbh

Every unmoderated internet space is destined to look like that. Just use it for music sharing and you won’t even know the chat is there.

For the record, I have not noticed this as “piracy in general”, no. Malware, dubious claims, dubious quality, dubious people, “extra information” that’s undesirable? Sure, they all happen, that’s part of the whole “get shit for free” deal. People are dipshits and I get how that’s really annoying. But… aren’t you in it for the free shit? Do you need to engage with the community much?

Racist, sexist, homophobic (etc. - god knows it’s a long enough list) are generally “edgy” and therefore automatically hysterically funny to a bunch of people - teenagers and others who might be well represented in piracy for whatever reason. Hell, some of that shit is funny even if you ethically oppose it 100%.

You don’t need to participate, agree or approve, just get what you came for and leave the edgelords to their edgelording.

Don’t go in the chatrooms except for private ones is my rule for soulseek for exactly this reason.

If you ignore the chatrooms, you should still be able to use it effectively.

it’s pretty widely known that its a toxic hellscape there, i’ve typically had great interactions with users in dm’s but the chatrooms have become overrun with toxicity and fascists over the past decade, it’s absolutely not representative of the online music community which is largely left leaning, even on p2p and piracy platforms

i tried it for 10 minutes and nobody ever replied to me

also, anonymity? Isn’t direct ip address connection, so easily traceable?

If this is the general spirit of piracy, I don’t know if I’m interested

I don’t use soulseek but no, I certainly wouldn’t describe that attitude as the general spirit of piracy. I’m mostly familiar with the private torrent trackers. While I’ve certainly come across fascists (EMPRESS is a good example, they’re pretty explicitly transphobic and include a bunch of slurs in their nfo’s), I generally come across plenty of libs and even some anarchists and communists. And based on events and how the private trackers are moderated, the staff, at least on the sites I use, they seem pretty alright. For example, I know of at least a couple trackers that ran events for pride month.

And from hanging out in leftist spaces, they seem especially cool with piracy. They’re anticapitalist after all, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.

I have a somewhat large share on Soulseek. It’s fun to occasionally go through the chat rooms and ban all the blatant racists and homophobes.

Yeah I would just stay clear of the chat. There’s plenty of normal people on the network, it’s just they don’t use the chat either. I’ve met some cool folks through DM’s though.

Lots of crossover between 4chan and the general piracy community. First place I actually heard about soulseek was on the 4chan music board. I don’t really go there anymore. So yeah, its 4channers thinking they’re in good company.

It’s the internet. Youre going to run into people you don’t like online. If you want to live in a coca cola commercial I hear there’s a whole strip mall of multi billion dollar corporate websites you can use, stick to those.